They have been many supply chain postponement strategies kinds of research, however, the majority have focussed on inventory management and lead time (Pu & Quan; 2010). As the major contributor to the country economy, the South Africa automobile industry is at the centre of job creations and economic growth, thus addressing many social ills such as inequality, unemployment’s, poverty and crime to name a few. It is therefore imperative to satisfy the customers to expect growth of the industry, which translates into job creation and economy growth and life improvement. This research explores the link between the assembly to order and customer satisfaction in the South African automobile supply chain. A cross sectional survey was undertaken, using the closed-ended question to collect quantitative data from 384 respondents working for the car dealerships, which were analysed to test the formulated hypothesis linking the postponement strategy ATO to customer satisfaction. The findings have revealed that indeed customer’s inputs through the process potentially improve the customers’ satisfaction, by improving the fives service quality variables (Yarimoglu, 2014) namely the tangibles, the responsiveness, the empathy, assurance, reliability. The main recommendations to the key players at this level of the chain is to improve
their customer’s relationship management and mine more information or input from the end customers which they have access to, trough the customers decoupling point, ATO, by means of marketing and market research so that their customers can be satisfied and remain loyal. This research could thus improve the marketing and customer relationship strategy and grow the South African automobile market
share, securing jobs and creating some.